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2015-10-21, 18:21
(This post was last modified: 2015-10-21, 18:22 by clarkss12.)
I just want to pass along a little information about some of these Chinese companies. It has always been the notion that you do not receive any support at all from most if not all of these Chinese companies, and I certainly can state that from my perspective as a purchaser of these media boxes, for 2.5 years that is Soooo true.
Well, for whatever reason, more and more of these Chinese companies are taking their long term survival more seriously. My Tronsmart Ara X5 died after 10 days of usage, the first for me with the dozen or so boxes I have purchased. Anyway, it died Monday morning, so I posted on the Tronsmart website about it dying, later that evening, (remember China is about 12 hours difference than me.) I received a PM on what to do. The next day, I mailed the X5 to the distribution point in California. I PM's the support person at Tronsmart with the tracking number, and that it is scheduled to arrive at their distribution point Thursday.
Well, a few minutes ago, I was on the Tronsmart form and there was another PM for me, the support person said they have dropped shipped me a new box from Amazon, and she will get a tracking number for me.
I thought that was awesome support.. Btw, not too long ago, I always SWORE that I would never EVER purchase a box from Rockchip or Tronsmart.
These companies are really trying to do what is best for the customer.
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Thought I would pass along some information about Tronsmart and Geekbuying. My box died on Monday, and today Thursday, UPS dropped off a new box, typing on it now. Way to go Tronsmart and Geekbuying, awesome support.
There was no hassle at al, I just posted on the Tronsmart forum that my box died, and they PM'd me telling me what to do.
Disclaimer: I have NO affiliation with either Tronsmart or Geekbuying.
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clarkss12, good to hear their customer service gets better and better :-)
So now you have new box, I'd like to ask you to do me a favour and post two screenshots I've mentioned before.
Thanks in advance,
finger,
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noggin
Posting Freak
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From memory the Baytrail-T Z-series (and I wouldn't be surprised if the Cherry Trail equivalents were similar) output DD/DTS/DD+ passthrough/bitstream or up to 8 channel (i.e. 7.1) PCM. If you are running Windows then you can chose either to bitstream DD/DTS or decode to multichannel PCM and output multichannel PCM. Your amp will reflect the difference between the two.
If you have suitable software, you could losslessly decode DTS-HD MA or Dolby True HD to PCM 5.1/7.1 as well as playing content with PCM 5.1/7.1 tracks without quality loss too. You won't be getting HD Audio bitstreamed, but you will still be getting lossless decoded HD audio (you have just switched the decode process from your amp to your computer). This requires that you have a codec pack or player software that supports HD Audio decoding. Until recently there were only Open Source decoders for Dolby True HD but not DTS-HD (MA and HRA). However there are now Open Source decoders for DTS-HD MA and HRA too. (Which is how the Pi 2 supports HD Audio lossless playback)
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With the Intel TXEI I didn't notice anything new but firmware and drivers were a few points newer is all, with the Asix NIC drivers I noticed it was a bit faster to gather all networks devices (but thats very very circumstantial and may well be my mind playing tricks on me).... ! The version I found was 3.18.10.
It's a weird choice to put a 10Mbps NIC on the device when a Gbps one is probably a few cents more only.
I'll look into the H7 maybe I'll switch.
In Windows 10 u might need to change the network to a private one in order for share discovery to work? By default all networks start out being Public...maybe thats it?
~Koog
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I can see my Synology just fine in the windows 10 Network display... it appears as another machine. I can then click through the machine to see what folders are shared on it.
If you want to you can map a shared folder as a drive and see it in windows explorer as if it part of your machine - I prefer to not to map drives though.
Whats NAS do you have? Maybe you need to enable SMB sharing and network workgroup name or something?
~Koog
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I have an older Synology DS211j and a new WDMyCloud 4 terabyte. File explorer sees them as a DLNA client, and when I click on the NAS icon it opens a web page instead of the file structure. When I use Windows explorer on my Windows7 desktop machine and click on the NAS icon I see ALL the files and folders.
